Clinical oncology training: The trainees' perspective

摘要

Clinical oncology training has changed greatly over recent years. About 350 clinical oncology trainees are distributed across 20 training programmes in the UK, with one third of trainees working in London. Current trainees are a mix of year 4-5 specialist registrars, appointed before 2007 via the 'old' Caiman training system, and 'newer' specialty registrars, appointed via the Modernising Medical Careers reform.The Kent, Sussex and Surrey Deanery co-ordinates centralised national recruitment to clinical oncology higher specialty training. The interview procedure consists of three 10 min stations: management of clinical scenarios, an ethical scenario and portfolio review/commitment to specialty. A structured scoring system is used, with posts allocated according to performance ranking. One of our authors underwent this process. Her experience was that the process was not sufficiently flexible to facilitate demonstration of thoughtful discussion. For unsuccessful applicants, no alternative posts, such as locum-appointments-in-training, were advertised until late July.